4 ms·

Likewise, that's some of the best advice on speaking I've gotten too. I always picked five people - front right, front middle, front left, back mid-left, and ba

Likewise, that's some of the best advice on speaking I've gotten too. I always picked five people - front right, front middle, front left, back mid-left, and back mid-right, and just cycle through them. If you know one of the people personally, all the better - they're more likely to give you a little nod or otherwise encourage. Definitely move around. Also, people forget - first and foremost, you've got be entertaining. If you're informing but not entertaining, people will tune out. Energy levels higher than normal. It's hard to have too high energy so long as you're not out of control. It's very easy to have too low of energy. Rarely has a speech been bad because the talker was too enthusiastic (I know there's memorable counterexamples, but they're really truly the exception).

philwelch 16y ago
Rarely has a speech been bad because the talker was too enthusiastic (I know there's memorable counterexamples, but they're really truly the exception). Very few people even have the capacity to cross the line between "enthusiastic" and "Ballmeresque". Even then, many of the exceptions only look silly on video, which is naturally out of context. Howard Dean seemed way too enthusiastic in this clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5FzCeV0ZFc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5FzCeV0ZFc) but from the crowd itself it was a lot different (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQh0BEUlJWY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQh0BEUlJWY).